I stand by my assessment that this is not a KILLER issue that any politician would pay attention to.
You know, retirement plans, medical benefits, taxes, those are big issues.
If it were sufficiently important, enough council meetings crowded with citizens demanding it, then it would get done.
Until then it's just a minority of geeks on the Intar-Tubes doing a circle-jerk.
This reminds me of a guy who proposed I should come up with a plan for winning the war in Iraq instead of criticizing George Bush, and that if I didn't have one I should just shut up. I think that criticism in public policy is useful. You disagree.
The price of the GAS didn't go up that much from one year to the next. I looked at my therms values on the bill, which actually became a smaller and smaller percentage of the bill. Consistently about $10 of it was the gas. The majority of the bill became various fees for overhead of all sorts.
Actually I work with a small neighborhood WISP myself, so I wouldn't characterize it as FUD but informed opinion.
We use a dozen Linksys AP's. Can we cover all areas in our neighborhood? No. Maybe 60%. A lot of that has to do with interference in the 2.4 GHz spectrum. With only 3 usable non-interfering channels and cordless phones, baby monitors and microwave ovens, there are swaths of areas where interference is so intense no amount of fiddling we have tried would let us cover them. Things may be different for you, but in a downtown Atlanta neighborhood, Universal WiFi is just not feasible.
Advocacy pieces like this always have 2 elements they are touting right up top. Cheap and Universal. It's usually neither cheap nor universal.
Our little WISP is run on the cheap. But we don't offer 24x7 support, or climb on towers during bad weather, or any of the things a city-wide ISP would be expected to. Extrapolating from running a small WISP to providing a city utility isn't valid. Hell I don't even have enough spares for a few crucial parts, if they blew we'd be a week fixing it.
I often find it funny that very technical people think internet is important to everyone. To a lot of people, it really isn't. Nice to have yes, important no.
In our urban area, I would consider 30% of the area not feasible to cover due to interference and similar issues that are beyond our control.
Notice how the headline used "wireless"? Notice how the article and report both mention wireless? Hmmm.....
Is this like a loss-leader in sales? We don't actually have the item you posted in the flyer, but now that we've got you in the store we'll sell you on one of these other items that maybe isn't quite such an unbelievable deal...
You see it as a simple marketing or sales tactic, I see it as more business as usual.
South Korea has much higher population-density making it easier. Does that Wikipedia article indicate that the infrastructure is owned by the government. It may well be, but it doesn't state so in that entry, it just says "the government actively supports this" which can mean a lot of things.
Are you going to tell everyone in the USA they need to move out of the burbs, and into apartment blocks because it's cheaper to offer internet that way?
Or do we just absorb the enormous cost of running fiber to every single-family dwelling in LA's urban sprawl, because you know, it's the right thing to do and mere money shouldn't stop us from doing right things?
Not exactly, those are usually government-granted monopolies. The government has oversight and sets some controls, but is not directly funding anything. In exchange they grant the company the protection of little or no competition so they have a stable long-term guaranteed profit. I rather suspect that if the City ran the power-plants and the substations, my lights would be on about 20 hours out of 24. There's a difference between planning a road network, and keeping the lights on or dial-tone available. I trust city governments very much for certain things, and not at all for others.
The article and linked report look to me to be proposing something different from that. City ownership of the infrastructure with private companies involved at some vague other level. As I said other places, I can't understand enough about exactly WHAT they are proposing and the DETAILS of how it would work, to really say for sure. The devil is in the details.
That's a lot of "ifs" and suppositions. Somehow if the government runs it and resells it, it'll be more efficient. Somehow.
I remember when I lived in Atlanta and there Altanta Gas Light that sold you gas, and that was that. Service was actually quite cheap, I lived alone and rarely recall my bill being above $30/month.
Suddenly they decided it should be deregulated because competition was good for the consumer. Except, now there were all these little companies reselling service from the single-provider. How's that? Well now you've got more paper-pushers to fund. The providers and the resellers and they have duplications internally. You know when it's just Atlanta Gas Light there's just one big happy company and certain limits. Now we've got to have enough accountants to keep an eye on things for the 30 reseller companies. And they've got to have accountants to talk to our accountants. And we all have to have lawyers and secretaries and customer support people, etc. etc.
So at the end of all this "reseller" business which was supposed to save us money, my bill was usually about double what it was before.
Last I checked any city owns all the right-of-way it needs to lay all the fiber into the ground it wants to.
So what you are saying is your politicians, all of them, in every city have lacked the WILL to spend the money put fiber everywhere.
Sounds like a problem you should be taking up, by talking to your politicians.
Again, I come back to the point of "just do it and let me know how it works out!"
Quite frankly to most rational people there are pressing problems on their list that outrank internet service and how it's funded. You know, schools, roads, crime, things like that.
I already read the Atlanta RFP. If you had read it in detail, you would see one of the few things they are able to offer as incentives was use of THEIR towers as broadcast locations. However they aren't usually all that well-sited for this particular need. What's a good tower height and location for a HF-radio system, may not work at all well for a GHz system. We ran a quick budget because the Atlanta neighborhood WISP I work with was interested. The numbers quite frankly suck.
Again, many of the "wireless" versions of solving the last-mile issue boil down to one of these: 1) Duplicate a bunch of corporate services 2) Put a gun to the head of existing companies and tell them "offer freebies or else" 3) Nationalize private-owned networks
Anyhow, we took a pass on the whole thing. Quite frankly there are going to be some vultures who will suck up the funding for this. They are ethically-challenged enough to play the game where the city pretends they are getting a great deal on your service, while actually money is passing hands in all kinds of funny ways and creative billing lets you bury in some dial-tone fee or some crazy junk like that to actually make some money on the deal. Because you know the way the politicians have to pitch it to the voters is it'll be CHEAP. We ran the numbers and there were very few incentives, a LOT of risk, and absolutely no will from the city side to offer any guarantees. We could spend a lot of money, be forced to operate at very minimal profit levels with a lot of oversight and junk to deal with, with no payoff down the road. Ultimately any rational being has some idea that if I slave away for 5 years there should be some payoff for this. Not as far as we could see, it was just maybe you'd get to keep slaving. No thanks.
You want my favorite bit from the crazy laundry-list that was the Atlanta RFP? Read the bit about maintaining WiFi service in moving vehicles. Obviously written by politicians without technical oversight. It simply is not possible to have continuous WiFi signal in a vehicle driving rapidly around a large urban area. Someone was thinking, well it works for my cellphone so those smart-boys can make it work for the WiFi card in my laptop too right?
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
To people in the Tech Industry, every problem can be solved with more computers, more network, and the right software.
There are people in this country right at this moment, without telephone service, or cable-TV, or maybe even enough food or enough money for the rent. Those are real problems. Getting internet, not so much.
Yes I did, and it's filled with more words but the same determined and deliberate vagueness. Lots of hand-waving and analogies.
Let me give you a SPECIFIC example, the "FR" talks about WiFi as an easy and cheap method to provide access. I work with a small WISP and I can tell you there are streets we simply CANNOT cover, because the people who live there already have private 2.4 GHz devices in large number and enough strength to make it impossible. Not difficult, IMPOSSIBLE.
Is the city going to mandate that all 2.4 GHz usage of cordless phones, X-10 cameras, private AP's, and baby-monitors must cease or be subject to fines?
You can't simply hand-wave this one away with "oh that greedy ISP isn't trying hard enough".
It really is that simple. Universal WiFi in an urban area is a pipe-dream. Yes you can point to tiny examples here and there like Mountain View where a company with more money than God can make it work, but that's hardly a fair comparison. Downtown Atlanta is not like Mountain View.
Yeah I guess a company that has umpty-billions in capital can subsidize wireless so their bedroom community looks leading-edge.
What does this have to do with the rest of the country? Is Google going to un-wire the rest of NorCal this year? No, you say?
Until then we'll have to come up with other plans. Besides I quite frankly couldn't afford to LIVE in Mountain View. Saving a few bucks on the ISP is hardly a reason to spend a million dollars for a 2x1 1960's ranch-house.
As I have said other places, keep it simple.
Point me to a PUBLICLY OWNED TELEPHONE NETWORK IN A LARGE CITY as an example.
Just one.
Roads and canals are quite different from telecommunications. Yes there are ways in which they are similar, there are others where they are not. A road doesn't require complete replacement because neighboring roads have switched to a new protocol. Networks and electronics are considerably faster-evolving and not well-suited to the leisurely pace that is an asset in some city projects. I want the dam or bridge well built, I don't care how long it takes.
Again, there are many inappropriate analogies people will dredge up. My point is why bother? Pick something that IS very close. Or hell, just point to one city that is actually DOING THIS and not just flapping their gums about it.
"I'm sorry Mrs. Lee, we cannot fund your orchestra this year because we are putting up fiber for our new city-wide data network. Choices must be made, and the people have spoken that free internet is the most important thing on the agenda. After all, we can listen to music on computers now what do we need you for? My teenager Bobby showed me websites where I could download music."
Get back to me when that's working out for you buddy.
I can count the number of fabulous free-internet-for-everybody on.... no fingers of one hand.
Sure it's fundamentally flawed.
Say someone says "I want free telephones for everyone, cause my Aunt Mildred might need to call 911, and I want her to be able to do that with guaranteed City service!"
So everyone dutifully pays their taxes and gets a phone system installed. Designed by committees and politicians, and run by the same type of guys who fill the potholes in your streets. Yeah, when it works, it'll probably work okay. However, oh we didn't account for what happens when someone's 12-year old kid wants to use that phone 24x7 to talk to their friends in Sweden, we'll have to have more money to address that problem. Yeah, so your idea is you want to run a Grand Experiment, with vague promises that it'll be cheaper and better go right ahead.
As I said, I'll be happy to read some of those success stories. I think we've had enough years by now where someone could have applied this idea. After all, the telephone has been around a long time, couldn't we apply it to a "simple" technology like that to get out feet wet? What makes people think computer networks are somehow special or different than other telecommunications networks?
My point is for years we've been treated to theories about how somebody's got a Big Idea on how to run telecomm networks in the public benefit and do it better and cheaper. I simply don't buy it, that the EVIL FORCES have stopped them every time. There should be even one shining success somewhere we could point to, you know some medium or larger city that pulled off an idea like this. So why haven't we? Answer that if you can.
The article mentions wireless as a solution, but is not the focus of the article.
Overall, this is an incredibly vaugue policy puff-piece. It seems "for" city ownership of networks mainly by comparison to things cities already own like roads and sewer systems. I'll note that it studiously avoids the obvious comparison...
TELEPHONES!
Why don't we talk about case-studies of cities owning phone systems in the public interest. That would be directly applicable experience to running a complex network.
It is conspicuous for it's absence.
Haven't we been hearing for 5 years now that Muni-WiFi is going to solve all our problems?
Yes there are some fools who think because they can setup Aunt Mildred's WiFi-router, that they are now well-equipped to cover a city! Issue of interference, maintenance, management of free-loaders, paying for 24x7 techs (think AT&T linemen) and consequent insurance costs, etc. never seem to enter their minds. I read the RFP for the City of Atlanta muni-WiFi and couldn't stop laughing. For all the freebies and conditions they wanted to layer onto it, there was no contract lockin as incentive. Meaning you could spend years and get a network setup, then the next administration rolls in and says hey we are changing contractors because my cousin knows all about computers, please hand over the keys.
Now, where's my flying car?
I let a guy like you, follow me around for a day, that changed his mind.
From new services that maybe YOU don't see but some other department does, to visible ones like Podcast servers, to just generally maintaining and updating the mountain of existing services, it can be quite a job in a DataCenter. You have 70,000 customers, all of them want better security, none of them want you to change ANYTHING about how they do their job because by God they've been using Telnet and FTP for 20 years.... Nobody will let you work on anything during the day so you have to schedule maintenance cycles during nights and weekends. You can't just "try something out", an extensive test procedure has to be followed for everything. Documentation must be maintained. Cross-training coworkers.
At the end of the day I offered to let him answer my pager which goes over 3 or 4 times every night for something, he declined. Walk a mile in another man's shoes first.
CONTROL over the mailboxes is a very real issue for any large operation.
By that, I mean all the business that gets transacted over email, that the organization needs to protect from inappropriate eyes, and make available to appropriate ones.
With an on-campus system, if an employee walks off the job, and the organization needs access to their mailbox there are procedures for that which respect privacy while making sure what of it that is business-related is retained. Similarly if a student claims "I sent my homework, the email system must have eaten it!" the prof can call us up, we check the logs, and say whether the student is lying or not. You can probably think of other scenarios but I think you get the idea.
University higher-ups probably won't like the idea, that when things all go wrong, they can't just pick up the phone and have a flunky immediately fix it. That sort of service just doesn't happen with GMail or MS mega-corporations, you wait in their live-chat or phone-queue like everyone else.
Copyright is now all about protecting the interests of Sony and other mega-corporations. It has ZERO to do with "the public interest" which is NOT served by 95-year copyright terms. Do the corporate-whores go to jail when they steal from us and the authors? No they do not.
If Father Cox and Father Raymond start slugging it out in public, some people will just leave the church instead of following a particular side of the schism. This is just sad!
If they want to make more tax money magically appear in California budget, they just need to repeal Proposition 13.
This is the ridiculous measure from decades ago, wherein property tax is decided at time of purchase. So if you bought your house in 1979 well you never have to pay higher property taxes. This measure has also been called "Screw The Newcomers!" as anyone buying a house now, will not only get to enjoy the outrageous mortgages, but disproportionately high taxes.
Unfortunately, much like Social Security, it's one of those FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED ideas that nobody wants to do anything about.
Slashdot Mirror
I stand by my assessment that this is not a KILLER issue that any politician would pay attention to. You know, retirement plans, medical benefits, taxes, those are big issues. If it were sufficiently important, enough council meetings crowded with citizens demanding it, then it would get done. Until then it's just a minority of geeks on the Intar-Tubes doing a circle-jerk.
This reminds me of a guy who proposed I should come up with a plan for winning the war in Iraq instead of criticizing George Bush, and that if I didn't have one I should just shut up. I think that criticism in public policy is useful. You disagree.
The price of the GAS didn't go up that much from one year to the next. I looked at my therms values on the bill, which actually became a smaller and smaller percentage of the bill. Consistently about $10 of it was the gas. The majority of the bill became various fees for overhead of all sorts.
Actually I work with a small neighborhood WISP myself, so I wouldn't characterize it as FUD but informed opinion.
We use a dozen Linksys AP's. Can we cover all areas in our neighborhood? No. Maybe 60%. A lot of that has to do with interference in the 2.4 GHz spectrum. With only 3 usable non-interfering channels and cordless phones, baby monitors and microwave ovens, there are swaths of areas where interference is so intense no amount of fiddling we have tried would let us cover them. Things may be different for you, but in a downtown Atlanta neighborhood, Universal WiFi is just not feasible.
Advocacy pieces like this always have 2 elements they are touting right up top. Cheap and Universal. It's usually neither cheap nor universal.
Our little WISP is run on the cheap. But we don't offer 24x7 support, or climb on towers during bad weather, or any of the things a city-wide ISP would be expected to. Extrapolating from running a small WISP to providing a city utility isn't valid. Hell I don't even have enough spares for a few crucial parts, if they blew we'd be a week fixing it.
Are you going to provide them a computer also?
I often find it funny that very technical people think internet is important to everyone. To a lot of people, it really isn't. Nice to have yes, important no.
In our urban area, I would consider 30% of the area not feasible to cover due to interference and similar issues that are beyond our control. Notice how the headline used "wireless"? Notice how the article and report both mention wireless? Hmmm..... Is this like a loss-leader in sales? We don't actually have the item you posted in the flyer, but now that we've got you in the store we'll sell you on one of these other items that maybe isn't quite such an unbelievable deal... You see it as a simple marketing or sales tactic, I see it as more business as usual.
South Korea has much higher population-density making it easier. Does that Wikipedia article indicate that the infrastructure is owned by the government. It may well be, but it doesn't state so in that entry, it just says "the government actively supports this" which can mean a lot of things. Are you going to tell everyone in the USA they need to move out of the burbs, and into apartment blocks because it's cheaper to offer internet that way? Or do we just absorb the enormous cost of running fiber to every single-family dwelling in LA's urban sprawl, because you know, it's the right thing to do and mere money shouldn't stop us from doing right things?
Not exactly, those are usually government-granted monopolies. The government has oversight and sets some controls, but is not directly funding anything. In exchange they grant the company the protection of little or no competition so they have a stable long-term guaranteed profit. I rather suspect that if the City ran the power-plants and the substations, my lights would be on about 20 hours out of 24. There's a difference between planning a road network, and keeping the lights on or dial-tone available. I trust city governments very much for certain things, and not at all for others. The article and linked report look to me to be proposing something different from that. City ownership of the infrastructure with private companies involved at some vague other level. As I said other places, I can't understand enough about exactly WHAT they are proposing and the DETAILS of how it would work, to really say for sure. The devil is in the details.
That's a lot of "ifs" and suppositions. Somehow if the government runs it and resells it, it'll be more efficient. Somehow.
I remember when I lived in Atlanta and there Altanta Gas Light that sold you gas, and that was that. Service was actually quite cheap, I lived alone and rarely recall my bill being above $30/month.
Suddenly they decided it should be deregulated because competition was good for the consumer. Except, now there were all these little companies reselling service from the single-provider. How's that? Well now you've got more paper-pushers to fund. The providers and the resellers and they have duplications internally. You know when it's just Atlanta Gas Light there's just one big happy company and certain limits. Now we've got to have enough accountants to keep an eye on things for the 30 reseller companies. And they've got to have accountants to talk to our accountants. And we all have to have lawyers and secretaries and customer support people, etc. etc.
So at the end of all this "reseller" business which was supposed to save us money, my bill was usually about double what it was before.
Last I checked any city owns all the right-of-way it needs to lay all the fiber into the ground it wants to.
So what you are saying is your politicians, all of them, in every city have lacked the WILL to spend the money put fiber everywhere.
Sounds like a problem you should be taking up, by talking to your politicians.
Again, I come back to the point of "just do it and let me know how it works out!"
Quite frankly to most rational people there are pressing problems on their list that outrank internet service and how it's funded. You know, schools, roads, crime, things like that.
I already read the Atlanta RFP. If you had read it in detail, you would see one of the few things they are able to offer as incentives was use of THEIR towers as broadcast locations. However they aren't usually all that well-sited for this particular need. What's a good tower height and location for a HF-radio system, may not work at all well for a GHz system. We ran a quick budget because the Atlanta neighborhood WISP I work with was interested. The numbers quite frankly suck.
Again, many of the "wireless" versions of solving the last-mile issue boil down to one of these:
1) Duplicate a bunch of corporate services
2) Put a gun to the head of existing companies and tell them "offer freebies or else"
3) Nationalize private-owned networks
Anyhow, we took a pass on the whole thing. Quite frankly there are going to be some vultures who will suck up the funding for this. They are ethically-challenged enough to play the game where the city pretends they are getting a great deal on your service, while actually money is passing hands in all kinds of funny ways and creative billing lets you bury in some dial-tone fee or some crazy junk like that to actually make some money on the deal. Because you know the way the politicians have to pitch it to the voters is it'll be CHEAP. We ran the numbers and there were very few incentives, a LOT of risk, and absolutely no will from the city side to offer any guarantees. We could spend a lot of money, be forced to operate at very minimal profit levels with a lot of oversight and junk to deal with, with no payoff down the road. Ultimately any rational being has some idea that if I slave away for 5 years there should be some payoff for this. Not as far as we could see, it was just maybe you'd get to keep slaving. No thanks.
You want my favorite bit from the crazy laundry-list that was the Atlanta RFP? Read the bit about maintaining WiFi service in moving vehicles. Obviously written by politicians without technical oversight. It simply is not possible to have continuous WiFi signal in a vehicle driving rapidly around a large urban area. Someone was thinking, well it works for my cellphone so those smart-boys can make it work for the WiFi card in my laptop too right?
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To people in the Tech Industry, every problem can be solved with more computers, more network, and the right software. There are people in this country right at this moment, without telephone service, or cable-TV, or maybe even enough food or enough money for the rent. Those are real problems. Getting internet, not so much.
Yes I did, and it's filled with more words but the same determined and deliberate vagueness. Lots of hand-waving and analogies. Let me give you a SPECIFIC example, the "FR" talks about WiFi as an easy and cheap method to provide access. I work with a small WISP and I can tell you there are streets we simply CANNOT cover, because the people who live there already have private 2.4 GHz devices in large number and enough strength to make it impossible. Not difficult, IMPOSSIBLE. Is the city going to mandate that all 2.4 GHz usage of cordless phones, X-10 cameras, private AP's, and baby-monitors must cease or be subject to fines? You can't simply hand-wave this one away with "oh that greedy ISP isn't trying hard enough". It really is that simple. Universal WiFi in an urban area is a pipe-dream. Yes you can point to tiny examples here and there like Mountain View where a company with more money than God can make it work, but that's hardly a fair comparison. Downtown Atlanta is not like Mountain View.
Yeah I guess a company that has umpty-billions in capital can subsidize wireless so their bedroom community looks leading-edge. What does this have to do with the rest of the country? Is Google going to un-wire the rest of NorCal this year? No, you say? Until then we'll have to come up with other plans. Besides I quite frankly couldn't afford to LIVE in Mountain View. Saving a few bucks on the ISP is hardly a reason to spend a million dollars for a 2x1 1960's ranch-house.
As I have said other places, keep it simple. Point me to a PUBLICLY OWNED TELEPHONE NETWORK IN A LARGE CITY as an example. Just one. Roads and canals are quite different from telecommunications. Yes there are ways in which they are similar, there are others where they are not. A road doesn't require complete replacement because neighboring roads have switched to a new protocol. Networks and electronics are considerably faster-evolving and not well-suited to the leisurely pace that is an asset in some city projects. I want the dam or bridge well built, I don't care how long it takes. Again, there are many inappropriate analogies people will dredge up. My point is why bother? Pick something that IS very close. Or hell, just point to one city that is actually DOING THIS and not just flapping their gums about it.
I'm afraid I can make no sense of your argument. Something about everyone getting access, and somehow this leads to good things.
"I'm sorry Mrs. Lee, we cannot fund your orchestra this year because we are putting up fiber for our new city-wide data network. Choices must be made, and the people have spoken that free internet is the most important thing on the agenda. After all, we can listen to music on computers now what do we need you for? My teenager Bobby showed me websites where I could download music."
Get back to me when that's working out for you buddy. I can count the number of fabulous free-internet-for-everybody on .... no fingers of one hand.
Sure it's fundamentally flawed.
Say someone says "I want free telephones for everyone, cause my Aunt Mildred might need to call 911, and I want her to be able to do that with guaranteed City service!"
So everyone dutifully pays their taxes and gets a phone system installed. Designed by committees and politicians, and run by the same type of guys who fill the potholes in your streets. Yeah, when it works, it'll probably work okay. However, oh we didn't account for what happens when someone's 12-year old kid wants to use that phone 24x7 to talk to their friends in Sweden, we'll have to have more money to address that problem. Yeah, so your idea is you want to run a Grand Experiment, with vague promises that it'll be cheaper and better go right ahead.
As I said, I'll be happy to read some of those success stories. I think we've had enough years by now where someone could have applied this idea. After all, the telephone has been around a long time, couldn't we apply it to a "simple" technology like that to get out feet wet? What makes people think computer networks are somehow special or different than other telecommunications networks?
My point is for years we've been treated to theories about how somebody's got a Big Idea on how to run telecomm networks in the public benefit and do it better and cheaper. I simply don't buy it, that the EVIL FORCES have stopped them every time. There should be even one shining success somewhere we could point to, you know some medium or larger city that pulled off an idea like this. So why haven't we? Answer that if you can.
The article mentions wireless as a solution, but is not the focus of the article. Overall, this is an incredibly vaugue policy puff-piece. It seems "for" city ownership of networks mainly by comparison to things cities already own like roads and sewer systems. I'll note that it studiously avoids the obvious comparison... TELEPHONES! Why don't we talk about case-studies of cities owning phone systems in the public interest. That would be directly applicable experience to running a complex network. It is conspicuous for it's absence.
Haven't we been hearing for 5 years now that Muni-WiFi is going to solve all our problems? Yes there are some fools who think because they can setup Aunt Mildred's WiFi-router, that they are now well-equipped to cover a city! Issue of interference, maintenance, management of free-loaders, paying for 24x7 techs (think AT&T linemen) and consequent insurance costs, etc. never seem to enter their minds. I read the RFP for the City of Atlanta muni-WiFi and couldn't stop laughing. For all the freebies and conditions they wanted to layer onto it, there was no contract lockin as incentive. Meaning you could spend years and get a network setup, then the next administration rolls in and says hey we are changing contractors because my cousin knows all about computers, please hand over the keys. Now, where's my flying car?
I let a guy like you, follow me around for a day, that changed his mind. From new services that maybe YOU don't see but some other department does, to visible ones like Podcast servers, to just generally maintaining and updating the mountain of existing services, it can be quite a job in a DataCenter. You have 70,000 customers, all of them want better security, none of them want you to change ANYTHING about how they do their job because by God they've been using Telnet and FTP for 20 years.... Nobody will let you work on anything during the day so you have to schedule maintenance cycles during nights and weekends. You can't just "try something out", an extensive test procedure has to be followed for everything. Documentation must be maintained. Cross-training coworkers. At the end of the day I offered to let him answer my pager which goes over 3 or 4 times every night for something, he declined. Walk a mile in another man's shoes first.
CONTROL over the mailboxes is a very real issue for any large operation. By that, I mean all the business that gets transacted over email, that the organization needs to protect from inappropriate eyes, and make available to appropriate ones. With an on-campus system, if an employee walks off the job, and the organization needs access to their mailbox there are procedures for that which respect privacy while making sure what of it that is business-related is retained. Similarly if a student claims "I sent my homework, the email system must have eaten it!" the prof can call us up, we check the logs, and say whether the student is lying or not. You can probably think of other scenarios but I think you get the idea. University higher-ups probably won't like the idea, that when things all go wrong, they can't just pick up the phone and have a flunky immediately fix it. That sort of service just doesn't happen with GMail or MS mega-corporations, you wait in their live-chat or phone-queue like everyone else.
Copyright is now all about protecting the interests of Sony and other mega-corporations. It has ZERO to do with "the public interest" which is NOT served by 95-year copyright terms. Do the corporate-whores go to jail when they steal from us and the authors? No they do not.
If Father Cox and Father Raymond start slugging it out in public, some people will just leave the church instead of following a particular side of the schism. This is just sad!
If they want to make more tax money magically appear in California budget, they just need to repeal Proposition 13. This is the ridiculous measure from decades ago, wherein property tax is decided at time of purchase. So if you bought your house in 1979 well you never have to pay higher property taxes. This measure has also been called "Screw The Newcomers!" as anyone buying a house now, will not only get to enjoy the outrageous mortgages, but disproportionately high taxes. Unfortunately, much like Social Security, it's one of those FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED ideas that nobody wants to do anything about.